YouTube to hire 10,000 reviewers to weed out offensive videos

Google subsidiary and popular online video streaming site, YouTube is recruiting 10,000 reviewers to monitor and control violent extremism that endangers children, reports The Telegraph.

Susan Wojcicki, Chief Executive of YouTube told the newspaper that ‘bad actors are exploiting” the internet site to “mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm’.

‘We will continue the significant growth of our teams, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018.’

The company along with other popular social media services like Facebook and Twitter have come under intense scrutiny over the availability of terrorist material and propaganda on their platforms. This comes in the wake of recent terror attacks in the UK that led to British Prime Minister Theresa May asking them to remove terror content from their sites.

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She said the company has developed ‘computer learning’ technology that highlights extremist videos and will deploy the same for tracking videos that risk children’s safety and promulgate hate speech.

The world’s second most popular website has so far removed 150,000 extremist content from the 2 million reviewed videos including the sympathetic posts by ISIS and Islamist terror group along with far-right extremists. About half a million hours of content are posted on its site every day.

The website announced last month that it will take out content on the platform that tries to pass as kid-friendly as numerous videos there contained profanity and violence.